Public Writing
Featured Essays:
Essay Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
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Academic ArticleEssay Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman
Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, ...
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Essay The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman
For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there ...
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Public Writing Archives
Featured Interviews:
Interview “Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne
A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape? “The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. ...
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Interview Interview with economist Tyler Cowen on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or the EU courts asserting that countries can force Facebook to take down content globally, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion. Tyler and Henry discuss these issues and more, including what a big ...
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Interviews
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Essays
Weaponized Interdependence – with Abraham Newman
In May 2018, the US Administration announced that it was pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, reimposing sanctions. Most notably, many penalties do ...
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“Democracy’s Dilemma” with responses from Riana Pfefferkorn, Joseph Nye, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Allison Berke, Jason Healey, Astra Taylor and danah boyd, and a reply to the responses by Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier. with Bruce Schneier
The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The ...
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Democracy’s Dilemma – with Bruce Schneier
How can democratic societies protect—and protect themselves from—the free flow of digital information? The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that ...
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By Punishing Iran, Trump is Weakening America – with Abraham Newman
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complained about Republicans in Congress who were grandstanding for harsher sanctions on Iran. Now, he has joined ...
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America’s Misuse of Its Financial Infrastructure – with Abraham Newman
THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array included such fanciful causes ...
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Facebook is Finally Learning to Love Privacy Laws (and Abraham Newman)
Nine years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that people do not care about privacy. Things have changed. Access the full article here.
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How Political Science Can Be Most Useful – with Jack Knight
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap is the longest running play in history. Its first run began in 1952, and it hasn’t stopped since. Another ...
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Defending Democratic Mechanisms and Institutions against Disinformation Attacks – with Bruce Schneier
To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain ...
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Is a No Deal” Brexit Still Avoidable? Why the Irish Border Remains a Stumbling Block for Negotiations
W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s comic history of England, 1066 and All That, talks about nineteenth-century British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s efforts ...
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The Most Damaging Election Disinformation Campaign Came From Donald Trump, Not Russia with Bruce Schneier
On November 4, 2016, the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” a front for Russia’s military intelligence service, claimed in a blogpost that the Democrats were likely to ...
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Information Attacks on Democracies – with Bruce Schneier
Democracy is an information system. That’s the starting place of our new paper: “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” In it, we look at democracy through the ...
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Three Moral Economies of Data – with Nils Gilman
In October 24, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an epochal speech to a conference of European data officials. Many outside the technology industry ...
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Hypocrisy is a Useful Tool in Foreign Affairs. Trump is Too Crude to Play the Game with Martha Finnemore
Hypocrisy has a bad connotation, but it offers a useful middle course in the world of geopolitics; it once lubricated the engine of U.S. power. ...
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The Wrong Way to Punish Iran with Abraham Newman
During the war on terror, the United States quietly turned the world financial system into a hidden empire. The American government used the power of ...
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The New Economy’s Old Business Model is Dead
The titans of the new economy are different from their predecessors in one very important way: They aren’t job creators — at least not on ...
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